Food, Gender and Cultural Hegemony - Kennesaw State University

Cualli 141
childhood. Thus class in this case becomes a matter of taste as well as education.
Jack Goody speaks of high cuisine as a level of art that is a product of the
combination of a wide variety of foodstuffs, some imported, and the cooking
traditions of several regions. In his view this really only comes to pass when
literacy makes it possible to collect the food traditions of various areas. According
to Goody, high cuisine is also distinguished (as for Bourdieu) by being desirable
because of the pleasure of consuming food, rather than because of hunger. Thus
for Goody, “the higher cuisine also incorporates and transforms what, from the
national standpoint, is the regional food of peasants and the cooking of exotic
foreigners…Thus the higher cuisine inevitably had to acquire ingredients from
'outside',” (Goody 98-105).
The relevance of this theory about a distinctive elite (or national) cuisine
becomes clear when we remember that both the Nahua and the Spanish were
hierarchical peoples, with fairly rigid social rules. Interestingly enough, it may be
that this similarity of the cultures was important in the development of what was a
recognizable national Mexican cuisine by the end of the eighteenth century.
Over the colonial period the Nahua peoples quickly adopted oranges,
chicken and pork into their diet, but never developed an affinity for wheat or for
wine. The Spanish against their will were forced to engage in wheat farming
because of indigenous resistance to this crop, which was much less productive than
corn or cassava. Corn, beans, squash, and chiles continued as the center of Nahua
food culture. Much of the Nahua aristocracy was eliminated, or, if female, was
incorporated into the class of Spanish conquistadores.
The Spanish improved their diet in the New World through much greater
incorporation of vegetables into their ubiquitous stews. Chiles as well became a
common element, along with corn and squash. Some indigenous foods and spices
were first incorporated into the European diet for their alleged medicinal properties
(Acosta 177-78; 180-182). The fact that both the Nahua and the Spaniard
primarily built their meals around stews and some roasted meats made this gradual
approximation of the two food cultures much easier. The high cuisine of the Nahua
represented by the more complex stews, and the use of chocolate was gradually
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